In this paper we argue that a combination of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Genre Theory can constitute a theoretical framework for understanding how digital genres evolve. Genre theory states that genres evolve over time through reciprocal interaction between institutionalized practices and individual action; that they develop from actors’ responses to recurrent situations, and are shaped around characteristics as content, form, functionality and purpose. Genres emerge out of practice and at the same time they shape that practice. While genre theory can describe the characteristics of a genre, it cannot handle the process of how a genre is formed and what powers and forces are involved in this shaping process. In order to address this problem, several authors have incorporated structuration theory into genre analysis. However, structuration theory can only catch these constitutional processes of genre in a very broad manner. As a genre is evolving and stabilizing over time in interplay with different actors, it goes beyond what is possible to explain only by means of structuration theory. Instead, ANT could work as a tool to capture the process of how a genre takes form in negotiations with different stakeholders. In this paper we discuss how genre theory and ANT can be combined in a framework for analyzing emerging genres. We apply this theoretical framework on an e-newspaper project that embodies a new genre in the making. We will here show how evolving genre characteristics are developed, formed and stabilized in a negotiation and struggle between the involved actors when they translate their interests in ways that finally are resulting in a new genre.

In this paper we report on a narrative study aimed at capturing consultants’ experiences of mergers – from an organizational and cultural perspective – during the so-called dotcom era. In the paper we focus on the problems that resulted from mergers between firms with totally different views on what it means to organize IT-business. The mergers studied led to cultural clashes in how to organize IT-projects, like different ways of managing, organizing, working, collaborating and experiencing the organization, but also implicit practices like dress-code, attitudes, lifestyle, norms and values. The empirical data is collected with the help of storytelling session where consultants tell stories about own experiences or stories that they have heard from colleagues. Stories are presented and discussed related to different themes, such as values, practices, culture/identity, and business models. We propose that these experiences of failed acquisitions and mergers embed important knowledge of the practices and problems of the organizing of IT-businesses.

A key issue in many organizations is how to disseminate information in an effective way and, more importantly, how to make use of this information in order to create new knowledge. One way of addressing this problem is to focus on how information is socially transformed into knowledge. This includes how knowledge is handled in practice and how the knowledge produced is qualified as being something worth knowing and acting upon. Two well-established practices for doing this are the refereeing system and the peer review process. These are used in scientific communities as a means of validating and legitimating knowledge, for example by reviewing journal papers before publishing or project proposals before granting funds, etc. This paper argues that peer review is a useful concept when looking at knowledge creation and legitimization in organizations. The social meaning of peer review is to legitimize new knowledge by organizationally sanctioning it and thereby creating a platform for collective sense making. This paper uses an example from a field study in a pharmaceutical company in order to illustrate this argument. The study took place in a quality support department where the quality of health care products and processes was assessed. The organization had a need for fast and reliable updating of information that could influence how the production process of pharmaceuticals should be carried out. In order to cope with these problems the department established an 'evaluation loop', which shared several characteristics with the peer review process.

Social media increasingly condition how public authorities build legitimacy when engaging with citizens. In this paper we report on a study of the increasing use of and exposure to social media and social networking platforms in two Swedish public authorities, the Social Insurance Agency (SIA) and the police force. Although formally grounded on the same civic principles, the two authorities have significantly different approaches to social media as a way to generate internal and external legitimacy. SIA has mainly implemented an e-government approach to rationalize services to become more efficient and customer oriented, by using social media as one of several media channels. The police force, however, adopted an e-governance approach to build legitimacy through interaction and reflexive discussion between government and citizens as a way to create transparency and nuance citizens’ attitude towards the police force. Building on a two-dimensional public government/governance framework, we reflect on how the two studied authorities’ social media practices shape and are shaped by different governing practices in their legitimacy work.

Public authorities are rarely associated with creativity and playfulness. Rather, it can be threatening civic legitimacy. With the introduction of social media, a new channel opens possibilities for officers to meet the public and interact in more personal and creative ways than previously. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, have become important in people’s everyday lives as well as for organizational use. These technologies encourage self-expression, and allow users to create and share content, to comment and show appreciation or dislike of content. It also makes social networks visible. For public authorities, social media is a double-edged sword. It is a promising technology for dialogue with the citizens, but it may also facilitate the mobilization and coordination of criticism from the public. This is due to the dynamics and disruption afforded by the social media platforms. With the Swedish police officers’ Facebook interaction as empirical setting, the aim of this paper is to discuss how the increased use of social media affects the police’s legitimacy work. The study contributes with a deeper understanding of the interplay between social media and competing value logics in the context of public authorities, as it highlights the institutional tensions between official authority and playfulness. The empirical example of the police is used to show how social media creates new possibilities for creativity and playfulness.

Over the last decade, free and open source software (FOSS) has gradually become recognized by different actors in society outside FOSS communities and increasingly integrated in corporate software development, challenging proprietary software practices and establishing new open source companies. Literature describing this transition is focusing a narrow view on the value of using FOSS, mainly understanding it as an efficient alternative to established models for software development. This is not sufficient to fully understand the uptake of FOSS into companies. In order to gain a deeper understanding of this, there is a need to articulate a wider range of different values associated with FOSS and how they interplay in the intersection of corporations and movements. To do this we propose the order of worth framework developed by French sociologist Luc Boltanski and colleagues, which focus on the arrangements of value logics as an analytical strategy to understand how values form strong or weak arrangements in processes of institutionalization. By applying the framework on key texts from the free and open source software movement as well as on a an interview study with professional software developers employed by firms, we set out to identify how values associated with FOSS become justificatory arrangements that give legitimacy to FOSS and how these arrangements change over time, from the early free software movement to the emergent uptake of FOSS in contemporary professional software development. By understanding how justificatory logics come to play and interplay, corporations that want to adopt FOSS can better manage their engagement in FOSS activities. Keywords: Free and Open Source Software, Orders of Worth, Justification logics, Value of Open Source.

As a result of various driving forces, R&D and innovation processes are increasingly opened up for external influences and resources. This has lead to a changing nature of innovation work to become more distributed, networked and fragmented. In companies, a consequence of this is that hierarchically defined directives are transformed to lateral agreements. For the employee, a consequence of this is that they are increasingly expected to justify the value of distributed innovation practices in relation to both their firm and external contributors of innovation, and by doing so they involve themselves in a process were accountability is horizontally redistributed. In order to analyze this process, we use a case of open source software development, were developers from eleven firms, using open source in their professional practice, are interviewed. We show how distributed innovation processes leave the professional developer with the responsibility to select and assure that external resources becomes advantageous to their work, and how they use different types of justification to account for the value of this appropriation. We identify how different spaces of accountability are formed, potentially leading to tensions between different logic of worth. Keywords: distributed innovation, developers, logic of justification, tensions, accountability

Free and open source software development (FOSS) used to be associated with an ideologically driven movement built around communities of voluntary members, organizing resistance against proprietary software development. Today, however, software firms perceive FOSS as a source of innovation. Previous research has investigated what this change has meant to movement driven FOSS, but we still need more knowledge about the professional programmers and their way of organize business driven open source software development in their daily practice. This article investigates the interpretative guidelines or justifying arrangement that guide their use of FOSS. The analysis is based on 30 interviews that were done during 2008-2009 with programmers who were employed either by software firms that had come to a point where they started to adopt open source, or by firms that always based their business on open source software development. Theoretical concepts that were used in the analysis mainly derive from the economic sociology of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevénot, and the results indicate the emergence of a new spirit of business driven open source, consisting of a combination of different justificatory logics. This new spirit is described as an arrangement guiding how professional programmers in today’s software industry perceive the worth of using open source code in their developmental work.

Companies are seeking methods to become more innovative. One strategy is to introduce disruption to promote innovation. An example of this is the uptake of Open Source Software (OSS) technologies, methods and mindsets by commercially driven actors. Contrary to the firm, open source is associated with hackers driven by a passion emerging out of a community or peer based innovation model. The fact that these hackers are highly engaged in collaboration outside the limits of the organisation, have meant that companies start to perceive them as potential resources enabling them to extend their innovative capacity. The passionate hacker is seen as an autonomous and positive disruptive force that can promote innovation for the company. This paper is based on an interview study with 30 software developers from ten companies that have chosen to introduce OSS as a vehicle for innovation. Theoretically, passion is understood as an urge to develop high quality software beyond the demarcations of the firm; it is a matter of craft or art, and the paper focuses on how this perception of the passionate hacker guides these professional developers at work. Thus, it is analysed how the discourse on the passionate hacker is transformed when it is adopted by developers working in a firm that expects organisational commitment. By studying the reshaping of these software developers’ practices, we show how OSS passion for disruptive innovation is transformed in a professional work environment, but also how disruption creates new demarcations when open source ‘culture of passion’ is introduced in firms.

20. Open source programmers strategies to cope with ideological tensions

In this paper we analyse how the increased use of open source software in companies affect employed programmers’ work, which we theorize as part of a larger secularisation process. We have studied both companies based on a more traditional proprietary model who are becoming open source oriented, and SMEs built around open source business concepts. This change results in a need for professional programmers to re-interpret open source within a new business oriented context. We study what kind of strategies programmers develop to cope with these contradictory systems and how it changes work roles and programmers’ approaches towards open source community work.

While it is generally accepted that patient centred care should be the guiding principle for the delivery of health services, it is not yet clear how this should be digitalised. What is clear, however, is that the current IT solutions are not satisfactory. In this research, we suggest the affordance construct as an analytical lens to understand how technological artefacts and human agency can generate action possibilities to support horizontal process innovation by asking: (i) which affordances enable digitalisation of patient centred healthcare, and (ii) how can these identified affordances be leveraged to innovate patient centred digital hospitals.

Our empirical evidence is a comparative study of two hospitals in Sweden and Norway. Our theoretical contribution is the identification of six horizontal affordances for patient centred care. The practical contribution is that horizontal affordances emerge through configurations of human actors and lightweight IT solutions, loosely coupled to heavy weight systems.

Co-creation and open innovation is changing the context for virtual work and the role of culture in boundary spanning. Organizations that are opening up to embrace a more open way of innovating often meet heterogeneous stakeholders. Culture in IS research is often analyzed on an organizational level, however, boundary spanning in innovation work calls for theorizing culture on several levels. This study addresses the role of culture in a boundary spanning innovation project within the newspaper industry where end-users and newspaper representatives collaborated to design a new e-service.We apply grid-group theory to unfold the complexity of virtual open innovation and conclude that stakeholders from both inside and outside the organization need to cross cultural boundaries to align themselves with other actors in order to help facilitate collaboration. The findings indicate that boundary spanners move between cultural positions based on differing cultural values in relation to other involved stakeholders.

The news media ecosystem has expanded over the years leading up to today’s society to include advertisers, newspapers and other media houses, content producers, along with new players like social media platforms to together form a value packed mix of services for end-users to embrace. The shift from being a dominant platform owner concerning the printed paper, often with its own distribution network, presents the newspaper with many challenges when transforming into, or entering other platform owners’ ecosystems. While previous research has mainly focused on the newspaper industry’s development of strategies for embracing social media into their ecosystem, this study investigates newspaper workers’ social media usage for the purpose of attracting attention and generating value. The study of newspaper workers’ practices shows that, moving into digital platforms controlled by other dominant actors in the ecosystem, workers enact a tactical approach. Two tactics are identified: adaption and exploitation. The paper contributes with empirical insights into how newspaper workers develop practices to embrace social media that goes beyond previous research on social media strategy. We also apply the theory of everyday tactics developed by Michel de Certeau as a scaffold to theorize newspaper positioning in the rapidly changing news media landscape.

30. Strategizing in Digital Application Marketplaces

Ghazawneh, Ahmad

et al.

Halmstad University, School of Information Technology, Halmstad Embedded and Intelligent Systems Research (EIS). Department of Business IT, IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Organizational agility, a firm’s ability to manage dynamic change, has become strategically important for companies in their innovation work. In this context cultural aspects are especially important, as they can both support and hamper organizational agility. Differences can generate innovation ability but they can also create conflicts between competing value systems, thus reducing the firm’s ability to develop organizational agility to support innovation processes. We conducted a comparative study in incumbent firms and startups in the automotive industry to identify the influence of entrepreneurial cultural values on organizational agility. The Competing Values Framework was applied to identify the relationship between cultural values and organizational agility. The result shows that cultural differences affect the companies ability to develop organizational agility for innovation work. In particular incumbents struggled to enable a change towards organizational agility. We found that startups integrated Clan and Adhocracy into an agile culture, which enabled continuous innovation growth.

We have studied a two-year project aiming at exploring the potentials of the e-newspaper, i.e. a news service published with e-paper technology. Different actors have interests in this process, e.g. newspaper publishers, device producers, readers and advertisers. These actors are forming value networks by negotiations of interests and positions. The contribution of the paper is twofold: firstly we show how the value network created around e-newspaper is dependent on the convergence of different actors and their interests; secondly our theoretical contribution is to show how Actor Network Theory (ANT) can be used in combination with other theories - in this case genre theory - to analyze emergent value networks. ANT captures the general process of how the value network takes form, while genre theory captures the domain specific context of e-newspapers, and how this structures negotiations between different stakeholders who want to form the e-newspaper genre.

This paper identifies and analyses the effects of picture archiving and communica- tion systems (PACS) on radiographers’ work practice. It shows that the introduction of PACS did not simply entail the transfer of data and information from the analogue world to the digital world, but it also led to the introduction of new ways of communicating, and new activities and responsibilities on the part of radiography staff. Radiographers are called upon to work increasingly independently, and individual practitioners require higher levels of professional expertise. In all, this paper demonstrates that new technical solutions sometimes lead to sub- stantial changes in responsibilities in work. In this example, the radiographers’ work practice has become more highly scientific and they are enjoying a higher level of prestige.

With the expansion of e-health systems to more diverse and heterogeneous contexts and user groups, it is increasingly important to include users in design. Designers recognize the benefits of user participation, but including users with lowered cognitive and social abilities can be difficult. This paper intends to answer how these users can participate in the design of e-health systems. We conducted a case study with stakeholder interviews and design workshops with users diagnosed with schizophrenia to identify and overcome the challenges for participation. From the stakeholder interviews, we identified challenges relating to social interaction, technical experience, cognitive ability, and loss of individuality. We designed workshops that addressed these challenges and identify five strategies for unlocking the design potential of the participants: (1) work together with concrete materials and examples; (2) maintain a positive focus; (3) accept all ideas; (4) maintain and require realism; and (5) use previous interaction. We conclude that, when supported appropriately, it is possible to involve people diagnosed with schizophrenia. We also highlight the difficulty for someone not self-experienced to understand contexts as challenging and sensitive as this, and thus the value of user participation.

Opening up firms to open source has changed professional programmers' work in software development. In their work practice they must cope with two modes of software production: one based on proprietary, closed work situations, the other built around open source community ways of cooperation and knowledge sharing. In this article we present a study of how programmers cope with the co-existence of an industrial/commercial and a community/commons based mode of production. We analyze how they develop strategies to handle tensions that arise from contradictions between these two modes, and how it changes programmers' approach towards open source software development in the company. The study covers proprietary companies that have gradually incorporated open source software (hybrid companies) and SMEs entirely built around open source business concepts (pure-play companies). Four strategies are elaborated and discussed in-depth: Engineering in the lab, Market driven tailoring, Developing the community consortium and Peer-production. At a more general level, the study contributes to our understanding of how the transformation of proprietary production processes into a more open mode of knowledge work is not only associated with company strategies, but also with tensions and new demands on how work is strategically handled by knowledge workers.

In this paper we analyse how the increased use of open source software in companies affect employed programmers’ work, which we theorize as part of a larger secularisation process. We have studied both companies based on a more traditional proprietary model who are becoming open source oriented, and SMEs built around open source business concepts. This change results in a need for professional programmers to re-interpret open source within a new business oriented context. We study what kind of strategies programmers develop to cope with these contradictory systems and how it changes work roles and programmers’ approaches towards open source community work.